Thursday, September 13, 2012

The sweetest gift

Assistant Cook County Public Defender Jeanne Bishop wrote the following in a recent essay in the Huffington Post:

It's the mothers who come, who accept collect calls from their children in the jail. The mothers who put money on the books so my clients can buy things they need from the commissary: toothpaste, underwear, food. The mothers who take the bus to the jail and go through security and wait patiently for their name to be called, to talk to their son or daughter through a hole in glass.

The mothers are the ones who call me. Can I get their daughter out of custody and into an inpatient rehab program? Can their son get electronic monitoring so he can come home?

The mothers are the ones who cry in the hallways. They are the ones who yell, who demand, who sometimes scold me for not doing enough to help their child.

I am reminded of "The Sweetest Gift," performed here by Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris:

You were her baby, and e'er will be

Posted at 09:05:12 AM

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The jail population is increasing, despite statements by the courts, the sheriff, and the county board that it needs to be reduced to save costs. Does anyone know why? One rumor has it that the state's attorney is getting tougher in plea negotiations, so more cases are going to trial, more dockets are clogged, and pretrial detainees are in the system longer. But the real scandal is that great ideas have been on the table for more than three years to implement a broad-based diversion program that would keep nonviolent first-time offenders out of the jail, but nobody wants to get behind the program, and the state's attorney has supported diversion only in a limited number of cases.

Watch for a renewed push to implement more effective solutions to jail overcrowding, as in the establishment of a diversion division in the circuit court.

It's the mothers who have raised these monsters!
The monsters that go out & rape, rob & terrorize their own communities.
Then the mothers want our sympathies.
You won't get it as we're all burned out on the sympathy front.
Stop blaming everyone else & fix your own community!

@EZ: I thought so. SHe was two years behind me at NU and her late brother in law was the brother of one of my high school classmates. I lived about a mile from where this happened at the time. What a terrible event.

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